Halo Infinite [XO, XPA, PC]

Veteran

Holy hell that sounds horrific. The last thing Sci-Fi needs in general, especially from Halo, is more political and societal commentary. Make an interesting story about defending against alien attack with cool visuals.

I wouldn't want it to be any more political than Red vs Blue, and it shouldn't have to be to get an audience.

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I think what we have now is old, repetitive and passé. The history is already there. Plus you don’t need a whole bunch of monologues of whose bad and why? Star Wars gets by without it.

I rather have a less epic story with more human complexity than “Here comes another set of aliens who happen to be genocidal imperialists!!!”

Now that’s the most overused trope in sci-fi.

Netflix is chocked full of straight to streaming movies of similar ilk.

VeteranRegular

I think what we have now is old, repetitive and passé. The history is already there. Plus you don’t need a whole bunch of monologues of whose bad and why? Star Wars gets by without it.

I rather have a less epic story with more human complexity than “Here comes another set of aliens who happen to be genocidal imperialists!!!”

Now that’s the most overused trope in sci-fi.

Netflix is chocked full of straight to streaming movies of similar ilk.

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when you camp tries to play sophisticated, it always fails pathetically. It stays being camp, only then also pretentious, boring and cringy. Good camp embraces its simplicity. Amd there is no way you will make a scifi game about super soldiers shooting things not be silly nerd fantasy. In fact I think Halo is already victim of all the aformentioned sins. What it needed is to be less serious, not more.
Doom 2016 got the idea.

Veteran

when you camp tries to play sophisticated, it always fails pathetically. It stays being camp, only then also pretentious, boring and cringy. Good camp embraces its simplicity. Amd there is no way you will make a scifi game about super soldiers shooting things not be silly nerd fantasy. In fact I think Halo is already victim of all the aformentioned sins. What it needed is to be less serious, not more.
Doom 2016 got the idea.

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Naw. I personally like Reach because it wasn’t about saving the galaxy and it’s impeding doom created a more serious and somber tone.

Veteran

I think what we have now is old, repetitive and passé. The history is already there. Plus you don’t need a whole bunch of monologues of whose bad and why? Star Wars gets by without it.

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Hmm.. Now I'm confused. When you said what you wanted from Halo was more politics and human motivations and complexity, the first thing I thought of was how the Star Wars prequels were routinely bashed for all their political nonsense with the Senate and the parallels to the UN and backstabbing politicians, etc.

I thought that was what you were asking for, but now you say Star Wars doesn't have that? It had three movies full of that.

Legend

when you camp tries to play sophisticated, it always fails pathetically. It stays being camp, only then also pretentious, boring and cringy. Good camp embraces its simplicity. Amd there is no way you will make a scifi game about super soldiers shooting things not be silly nerd fantasy. In fact I think Halo is already victim of all the aformentioned sins. What it needed is to be less serious, not more.
Doom 2016 got the idea.

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Yup, besides the bad game design of Halo 4 and 5, it's them trying to make a more morally gray story that drove a lot of people away from the Halo series.

In trying to make people question whether Master Chief was good, bad, or morally ambiguous and bring Halo politics into the whole thing, it made those games far less enjoyable and it's gameplay flaws far more prominent.

Naw. I personally like Reach because it wasn’t about saving the world and it’s impeding doom create a more serious and somber tone.

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At it's core, Reach was still Us against Them. You were destined to lose, but the whole game was about the heroic attempts by a group of 4 Spartans to at first save the planet, and then save as many people as they could.

You weren't sitting there playing a character that the game was trying to frame as a potential psychopath and mass murderer as they tried to do to the Master Chief in Halo 4, for example. Moral ambiguity never entered in Halo: Reach.

LegendRegularSubscriber

I agree with this. I don’t mind the gray area or moral ambiguity. And it can be in halo. Just not the master chief line. Some other line where they are doing shady shit with other characters in other areas. But MC is not the person fans wanted messed with.

In particular teams that fought insurrectionists. Would make for a good split arc

Veteran

The Marvel MCU map is difficult for lots to follow (see: Star Wars), but Halo was doing a fair job with the main MC line through Halo 3 and then Reach as an offshoot, but then it went sideways, IMO. But I agree, they need to keep the "larger questions" in the spin-offs, and allow MC to be the kick ass good guy that fans want him to be.

Regular

MCU is difficult to emulate because the company has a near century of material to draw from over 100s of series and 1000s of characters. Halo just doesn't have the sheer amount of material to draw from and the well is pretty much empty at this point. Thats why you get the questionable character arcs like in H4 and lack luster plot of 5. I don't think there is much more they can do with the Halo franchise as far as story is concerned because there simply isn't anything interesting left to be told. Regardless, IMO the backstory issues pale in comparison to the issues in game design.

Halo was one of those revolutions in FPS gameplay and scope and it simply isn't anymore so unless 343 are going to do something with the franchise that can once again shift the genre landscape, then the franchise will continue its decline from relevancy. At this point I don't think 343 has the ability to do so, and given past history I also don't think I am alone in that sentiment.

LegendRegularSubscriber

MCU is difficult to emulate because the company has a near century of material to draw from over 100s of series and 1000s of characters. Halo just doesn't have the sheer amount of material to draw from and the well is pretty much empty at this point. Thats why you get the questionable character arcs like in H4 and lack luster plot of 5. I don't think there is much more they can do with the Halo franchise as far as story is concerned because there simply isn't anything interesting left to be told. Regardless, IMO the backstory issues pale in comparison to the issues in game design.

Halo was one of those revolutions in FPS gameplay and scope and it simply isn't anymore so unless 343 are going to do something with the franchise that can once again shift the genre landscape, then the franchise will continue its decline from relevancy. At this point I don't think 343 has the ability to do so, and given past history I also don't think I am alone in that sentiment.

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but they can build new stories set in different time frames? and work their ways towards something like MCU has done.

Veteran

I agree with this. I don’t mind the gray area or moral ambiguity. And it can be in halo. Just not the master chief line. Some other line where they are doing shady shit with other characters in other areas. But MC is not the person fans wanted messed with.

In particular teams that fought insurrectionists. Would make for a good split arc

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You don’t have to make MC morally ambiguous. But the political environment surrounding the inner and outer colonies is nothing but gray. And MC in the games has floated above it all because the games are for the most part nothing but black and white. We all assume that MC is a stand up guy but he hasn’t been put into many situations that test his character or beliefs.

Even in Halo 5, we were given all this marketing about “Hunt the Truth” and this impending conflict between Spartan IIs and Spartan IVs. But that storyline boils down to this:

“We here to bring you in!”
“No, I’m in the middle of saving the galaxy!”
“OK, we’ll help you!”

Bah Humbug!!!

I rather have the Halo equivalent to ‘Tears of the Sun’ then another “Let’s save the galaxy from the big bad aliens for umpteenth time”.

And when I say complexity I’m not talking convoluted plot full of political machinations. Halo characters in the main games for the most part have literally no depth. Make MC a robot and it would require very little in terms of story changes to accommodate that alteration. I rather the games do more to show that MC is human other than state that he is.

Legend

MCU is difficult to emulate because the company has a near century of material to draw from over 100s of series and 1000s of characters. Halo just doesn't have the sheer amount of material to draw from and the well is pretty much empty at this point. Thats why you get the questionable character arcs like in H4 and lack luster plot of 5. I don't think there is much more they can do with the Halo franchise as far as story is concerned because there simply isn't anything interesting left to be told. Regardless, IMO the backstory issues pale in comparison to the issues in game design.

Halo was one of those revolutions in FPS gameplay and scope and it simply isn't anymore so unless 343 are going to do something with the franchise that can once again shift the genre landscape, then the franchise will continue its decline from relevancy. At this point I don't think 343 has the ability to do so, and given past history I also don't think I am alone in that sentiment.

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The problem isn't that they didn't innovate or create something new with Halo 4 and 5. The problem was that they REMOVED stuff in Halo 4 and 5 that existed in previous Halo games.

Some of the best enemy AI design in all of gaming. Weapons persisting on the ground. A nice mix of levels with large open areas and levels with claustrophobic corridors. Epic encounters that aren't repeated so many times that they become passe. Etc. How many times did you have to fight the Warden in Halo 5? It became so ridiculous that he became a joke. Why was the end boss fight in Halo 4 a QTE? Why the "F" did they have to mess with Cortana and then kill her off? They took everything good about Halo, and either removed it or changed it for the worse.

Fans just wanted another Halo. If they had stuck to the Bungie/Halo formula we wouldn't be having this conversation about how Halo isn't the franchise it used to be.

People are unhappy with the series because Halo 4 and 5 are NOT what people expect out of a Halo game. Think about this. Of the Bungie Halo games, the Halo game with the fewest sales was...Halo: Combat Evolved. Even Halo: ODST sold more.

Halo 4 sold well because people expected another great Halo game. Unfortunately it wasn't. It was absolutely nothing like previous Halo games. And then they combined it with a very un-Halo like story with political undercurrents that nobody wanted. It should have just been a new enemy menace and a heroic MC to stand against it.

So you see that reflected in Halo 5, the worst selling Halo game in the franchise, even worse than Combat Evolved which was on a console with a limited player base.

All 343i had to do was continue to make heroic Halo games without taking out things that are integral to being a Halo game and it would have continued to sell gangbusters year after year.

Regular

The problem was that they REMOVED stuff in Halo 4 and 5 that existed in previous Halo games.

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Yeah, exactly. Because its not Bungie making Halo anymore, its an entirely new studio whose soul purpose was to make more Halo. Expectations should change, and what H4 became didn't surprise me in the least. The people who make the game, paint the picture, direct the movie, write the song matter, and when those people aren't involved then your expectations probably shouldn't stay the same.

I personally dont think copying past Halo is even feasible at this point to just appease the audience left who remember "old Halo" while still matching MS financial goals for the series. I mean, its been nearly a decade since Reach, thats a lot of turnover in fanbase plus a lot of new FPS titles to grab peoples attention. Thats why I say 343 needs to make a Halo game that is going to shift genre to a new paradigm like CE did for the franchise to grow.

Veteran

I guess I'm definitely in the minority as I really enjoyed the movement and gameplay of Halo 5.

The campaign needed more Blue Team and Master Chief and less fight the same boss 4-5 times, but I enjoyed the new Spartan abilities as opposed to having them drop to be able to utilize them. It was definitely the weakest part of the whole package.

Legend

Yeah, exactly. Because its not Bungie making Halo anymore, its an entirely new studio whose soul purpose was to make more Halo. Expectations should change, and what H4 became didn't surprise me in the least. The people who make the game, paint the picture, direct the movie, write the song matter, and when those people aren't involved then your expectations probably shouldn't stay the same.

I personally dont think copying past Halo is even feasible at this point to just appease the audience left who remember "old Halo" while still matching MS financial goals for the series. I mean, its been nearly a decade since Reach, thats a lot of turnover in fanbase plus a lot of new FPS titles to grab peoples attention. Thats why I say 343 needs to make a Halo game that is going to shift genre to a new paradigm like CE did for the franchise to grow.

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I'm not sure about that. Halo 4 still had ~10 million unit sales based on expectations it would be like past Halo games. Halo 5 barely broke 5 million sales due to people now knowing it isn't like past Halo games. Basically Halo 4 sold in line with past Halo games while Halo 5 basically sold half of that.

That tells me that sales for the Halo series would have continued to be 10+ million sellers if they just kept to the Halo formula.

Either way, we'll get to see what direction they go with Halo: Infinite.

My hope, which is highly unlikely, is that they'll go back to the things that made Halo a great game (gameplay focused). The reality is that they are likely to go off on a complete tangent (open world, story heavy) due to how well that worked for Sony.

Legend

I'm not sure about that. Halo 4 still had ~10 million unit sales based on expectations it would be like past Halo games. Halo 5 barely broke 5 million sales due to people now knowing it isn't like past Halo games. Basically Halo 4 sold in line with past Halo games while Halo 5 basically sold half of that.

That tells me that sales for the Halo series would have continued to be 10+ million sellers if they just kept to the Halo formula.

Either way, we'll get to see what direction they go with Halo: Infinite.

My hope, which is highly unlikely, is that they'll go back to the things that made Halo a great game (gameplay focused). The reality is that they are likely to go off on a complete tangent (open world, story heavy) due to how well that worked for Sony.

ModeratorLegendAlphaSubscriber

Dont forget that Halo 5 also had all the horrible press from Halo: Master Chief Collection to deal with. It was also only sold on the Xbox One platform. So combine H4 and MCC negative influences with a significantly smaller consumer pool, so yes its logical that it would sell worse.

Not sure of H:Infinite sales potential, considering the frugal thing to do is pickup Games Pass for a month to try it out first or simply put money towards subscription of GamePass instead of buying 2 titles a year.

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